What the future holds

Saturday

Jun 6, 2009 at 12:01 AM

The year is 2085. A young man sits on the porch visiting with his great grandpa, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico from their beach-front house just off La. 1 in what was once Larose.“Great Grandpa,” the boy says, “What lessons were learned after the Hurricane named Quatrain?”Well, the old man looks over the sea’s rolling waves, feeling the breeze, and says in a crackling voice of age:Son, before that storm, if people needed to do something, they found a way to do it. My dad told me stories of hurricanes Betsy and Camille. He said they just picked up the pieces and started to rebuild their lives and the houses.He said that the National Guard came in to the stop the looters, at least the ones who got away from the guns of the landowners.There were no such things as building codes. Matter of fact, the old house I live in was built before codes. It has gone through the 1947, 1957, 1965, 1969, 2005 and 2008 storms.Those code houses, heck, they’ve been rebuilt a bunch of times.Another thing: We waited in line for an ice bucket, never waited for a handout credit card, nor a check. If we needed a loaf of bread, it was made from flour and other stuff.Since Katrina, the government came in, called themselves FEMA and handed out tons of money. Another hurricane came around and those FEMA people wanted to take money from you. They got flood insurance to double and triple. They did not want to build our levees.That’s the reason we are looking at the Gulf now. Once we drove 50 more miles south to get to the Gulf. Those FEMA people came down from Washington and made good, hard-working people into a bunch hand-me-outs. Instead of working to get what they need, they just place their hands out and cry on TV. Another thing we got was a bunch of college folks to study the levees and what we called coastal restoration. They did such a great job of studying that they are still studying.Thought maybe they would have enough study and little more work. Well, so much for thinking. Seems that has been taken away as well.Forrest Travirca IIILockport

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